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When I sat down to write my WEP
piece, I knew I wanted to focus on love.After all, it was February.Valentine’s Day brings with it romance, flowers, and chocolates for a
number of lucky people.For others, it
brings a reminder of loneliness or lost loves.Either way, the presence or absence of love causes lots of feelings.

Love is a popular subject to write
about, whether as the primary plot or a subplot, and it’s not surprising.As children, we’re born into families, and in
ideal circumstances, those families love and nurture us.As we grow, we make friends we come to love
like family, and when we’re old enough, we may choose to begin our difficult
and awkward search for a romantic partner.

Part of the desire to write about
love stems from wanting to understand it.What is love anyway?What should
we want from a relationship?What should
we expect?Why does it happen, and why
does it fall apart?These are tricky
questions to answer.

Love is difficult to define, but
descriptors for it abound.Love is
patient.Love will guide and support you
through the tough times.Love is
enduring.It’ll catch you when you fall.These are lofty promises, but they can be met
when we’re surrounded by caring people.And
if a person finds themselves alone in times of trouble, someone with a loving
heart may see that pain in their fellow man and lend a helping hand.This is love at its best.This is how beautiful love can be.It can enrich our lives and imbue our daily
routines with a sense of meaning and purpose.

Love also has a dark side.

Like Cupid’s famous arrow, love
strikes us without warning, and it’s not within our ability to control.We may decide whether to start a relationship
with someone, but that decision exists apart from the feeling we have. Cupid’s arrow doesn’t care whether it’s
welcome or not.The uncontrollable
nature of love can be a bloody nuisance, or worse, utterly devastating.“All’s fair in love and war,” an oft quoted
proverb proclaims.“Love is a
battlefield,” says Pat Benatar.These
nuggets of pop wisdom touch on that darkness.Love can be inconvenient.It can
even be dangerous to fall in love if society deems it to be wrong.At certain places and times (even today),
it’s been frowned upon or outright illegal to be with someone of a different
race, a different religion, or the same sex.The consequences for embracing that love can be devastating.Nevertheless, people have gone through all
kinds of personal hardships and taken grave risks to be with the one they love.

Love can also turn to contempt and
bitterness.The transition from love to
hate is treacherous and hard to understand.Maybe that’s why writers like to poke and prod at that transition so
often in their stories.It’s baffling
that such a drastic change in feeling is possible.This is where my story planted roots and
grew.

Cupid is love’s delivery boy.He is our attempt to comprehend the
incomprehensible.We give him credit for
the happy process of initially falling in love, but I wanted to find a way to
blame him for when it falls apart.Why?It sounded like fun.Why should he get credit for all the good and
none of the bad?That hardly seems fair.

My version of Cupid is not to be
trifled with or trusted.He’s dangerous
because love can be dangerous.When we
embrace love, we risk a broken heart.Is
loving someone worth that risk?We may
all come to our own conclusions on that one.Personally, I say yes, it is worth it.Just don’t irritate Cupid.He
could use some anger management classes.

Writers everywhere incorporate love
into their tales, and that’s wonderful.We get to find inspiration, joy, and sadness in reading about all the
ways love can either triumph or go awry.We get to explore all the possibilities together.Do you like to examine the nature of love in
the stories you write?Do you prefer
stories where love remains happy, or do you prefer when it takes a dark turn?

Congratulations LG. What a great post to accompany your great story! I do like to explore love in my writing. In fact, I use my writing to sometimes challenge my own ideals. When trying to understand the appeal of reading about love triangles, I wrote one myself. While I do prefer happy love stories, I don't shy away from more tragic ones.

Hi Yolanda and particularly LG ... I did love your Cupid story - so clever and so cleverly thought out. We all need love of some form ... and people who will pick us up should we fall - and we all fall in and out love at times ... I know that I couldn't write a love story ... but so appreciated yours.

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